Quoted:
hit & run is already a felony isn't it??
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No, Depends on your state
The lady that hit the homeless guy was not committing a felony while driving.
Read this:
By Mike Moore
While working as a newspaper reporter many years ago in Chicago, I covered crime news, including trials. A trial sometimes would involve "felony murder," a curious phrase in that murder was, by definition, a felony. A common scenario for felony murder would go something like this: Two guys would rob someone-a liquor store clerk, perhaps. Only one would have a gun. At some point, the gunman would fire his weapon, killing the clerk.
If caught, both men would be charged with first degree murder, and the penalties each man faced were identical, if convicted. The guy who hadn't shot anyone would almost always cry foul. Sure, he was guilty of robbery. But he hadn't intended to kill anyone. He didn't even have a gun. He was just a tag-a-long. His buddy, whom he now knows to be unstable and perhaps even psychotic, was the bad guy.
Nonsense, the prosecutors would reply. If someone was killed during the commission of a felony, all who had participated in the felony were equally guilty. It was the felony itself that had put the victim's life at risk. Hence the informal but widely used term "felony murder." Unfair? Some of my friends thought so, when I'd describe such a case to them. The shooter was clearly guilty; but the other guy was mainly guilty of bad judgment. He just wanted to grab some cash and get out. He was a thug, not a killer.
That's an appealing argument, and sometimes juries buy it when it's presented by articulate defense attorneys. But holding people accountable for the consequences of their actions is central to our justice system, as well as to our Western system of values. If we too readily let people escape the consequences of their actions, we devalue them as individuals. In some sense, individual human beings have a right to be punished.